


His Caretaker

by BleedingInk



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Hurt Castiel, Hurt/Comfort, Meg Lives, Some Implied Gory Imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-09 04:52:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12880548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingInk/pseuds/BleedingInk
Summary: The explosion boomed inside her head and the earth shook, making the bed jump over the floor and the windows clatter. Meg woke up abruptly, sitting up with her breath caught in her throat and her heart pounding hard in her chest.





	His Caretaker

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for my friend Lisa's birthday. Happy birthday, hope you like it!

The explosion boomed inside her head and the earth shook, making the bed jump over the floor and the windows clatter. Meg woke up abruptly, sitting up with her breath caught in her throat and her heart pounding hard in her chest. She hadn’t even realized she had fallen asleep, and now her hands and feet were shaking as she picked up a shirt from the floor and carelessly tossed it over her head.

There was only one thing that could have caused a noise like that. She ran down the stairs and opened the back door to the clearing behind the cabin.

Castiel was lying in the middle of a circle of blackened grass, his clothes bloody and his body contorted in a weird position. He was so still for a moment, Meg feared the worse, but then she heard him groaning in pain. She ran towards him and knelt by his side.

“Clarence?” she called out.

Castiel stared at her with his right eye (the left one was nothing but a swollen shut bruise) and opened his mouth to speak, but Meg shushed him. He needed to save his strength. She would berate him for being so careless and getting his ass kicked in the morning. Right now, she had to get him back inside the cabin, back to safety.

She grabbed his arm and placed it around her shoulder, but when she tried to get him to his feet, she found that her angel suddenly weighted a ton, even for her demonic strength. Not only that, there was something in his back that was making it hard for her to grab him by the torso and…

“Oh,” she muttered when she looked up and realized what it was. “Oh, dammit.”

“I…” Castiel started saying, but Meg shushed him again.

It was struggle bringing him in the cabin. She half-supported him, half dragged him with her until the cross the door and then gently put him down on the couch. Even then, Castiel winced and groaned as Meg took a step backwards and analyzed the situation. His left arm hanged uselessly on one side and…

Her heart was still pounding hard and her mind was raging with panic, but she tried to convince herself it wasn’t that bad. Castiel was strong. He had overcome worse things than just a brutal ass-kicking. His body would be fine.

It was the thing she was seeing right underneath his skin that worried her.

Castiel usually didn’t manifest his wings in the material plane. No angel did, as it took up an incredible amount of energy for them to do so. But sometimes Castiel did it for her. He liked to wrap her in them, and even though Meg protested that his feathers made her sneeze, she liked it as well. She liked how warm and safe she felt inside of them, how soft they were when she placed her cheek against them to sleep.

After losing and recovering his grace from Metatron, his wings hadn’t been the same. He showed them to her once, his eyes downcast and his face contorted in something akin to shame, to fear, as he assured her they would heal over time. It might take years, decades, even, before they were ever as they used to, before he could fly properly with them again. Meg had touched the few tattered feathers that he still had left, the exposed bones like black marble springing from his back and had told him they had all the time in the world.

Watching them now, Meg knew instantly what Castiel had tried to do and how much of a setback it would be for his healing. The left wing had suffered the same damaged that had dislocated his shoulder, and now it hanged on the side, broken and even more naked than before. If Castiel had flown away from the danger with it, it was a miracle that he landed exactly outside their cabin.

“Stay where you are,” she told him, as if he could go anywhere. “I’ll be right back.”

Her hands were a little firmer as she picked up the scissors, scalpel, bandages and other things she needed. She made a pit stop by the kitchen to get a can of frozen beans and returned to her angel’s side. In that time, he had managed to shed off his trench coat and unbutton his shirt. The state of his torso wasn’t any better than that of his face: there was blood on it and the ugly bruises looked like the shape of a military boot. Like he had been kicked repeatedly even when he was already down.

Meg’s blood boiled in her veins, but she told herself to focus on the task at hand.

“Do you have anything broken?” she asked him, as her eyes analyzed each of his ribs. “Anything ruptured?”

Castiel took a deep breath and grimaced. It was obvious he had been avoiding to breathe unless it was absolutely necessary.

“My… my lungs,” he muttered and coughed. The drops of blood flew from his mouth unto the carpet and Meg made a mental note to berate him for that, too. Later.

“Okay.” Meg raised a bottle to his lips and Castiel stared at her as if she was insane. “Come on, just a bit. For me?” she coaxed him, as if he was a little child who refused to take his medicine.

Castiel grabbed the bottle with his good arm and slowly took it to his lips. Swallowing must have been torture, but after he downed half a bottle of vodka, maybe it would numb him to what Meg was about to do. Not completely. Just enough.

She still gave him his own belt for him to bite down before she applied the scalpel against his skin and he still grew tense as the blood and muscles spread for her to sink her hands inside.

Castiel’s body tensed and then went limp as Meg pulled the rib out of the flesh and then held it in place for a few seconds before letting go. His skin and his muscles started closing over the incision she had made. He was hot, as if he was running on a fever, but she knew it wasn’t that. It was his grace, working overtime to try and fix his vessel. He could direct it somehow to his most dire wounds, but that only meant that others would go unhealed unless Meg did something for them.

It turned out that being a master torturer had given her an extensive knowledge about anatomy. Obviously, she could never do this with a human being, but when her angel liked to get himself in this sort of predicaments, she could help his body get back into shape a little faster than if he only had his now half-depleted grace for that. It was sometimes a gruesome and bloody business, but it was nothing she hadn’t seen or done in Hell anyway.

She scrubbed the blood off her hands with a towel, even though she was almost as covered in as Castiel by this point, and focused on his other injuries. His face would be bruised for at least a couple hours more, and his arm…

Meg tried touching it and Castiel let another whimper.

“Clarence, I’m gonna need to push this,” she said. “It won’t be pretty.”

Castiel took a deep breath (his lungs must have been working again) and nodded.

“Very well.”

He still closed his eyes and bit down on the belt again. He let out a muffled scream as his bones creaked back in their proper place.

“There we go. That wasn’t so bad,” Meg said. Castiel raised his good eye at her, as if to ask exactly what she meant, but Meg paid no mind to it. “Now, we just gotta patch up your wing up and get you to bed.”

Castiel’s hurt expression changed to one of panic and embarrassment.

“Meg, no. There’s no need…” he tried to protest, but Meg was already running her fingers to the brittle bones in his wings.

They weren’t as hot as the rest of him, though they were still warm underneath their hand. She knelt on the couch to have better access and held them together, the splintered ends matching like the pieces of a puzzle. She wrapped a bandage around them, firm enough that they would stay where they were, and placed the ends around Castiel’s arm and neck, like a sling. She was so focused on getting on the right angle that she didn’t notice the way he was staring at her until she was done.

“What?” she asked.

“You know it’s not going to…? It won’t exactly…”

“Yes, I know, I know,” Meg muttered, rolling her eyes. “The wings aren’t in the same plane of existence as you and me and they depend solely on your grace to heal. You don’t have to tell me. But by the looks of you, I don’t think you have enough energy to tuck them away right now, do you?”

Castiel sulkily tried to look away, but Meg put a hand on his cheek and slowly forced him to keep his gaze on her.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he admitted, with a groan.

“Well, then we get them in place and we find a position where they don’t hurt as much.” Meg shrugged. “Now, let’s get you upstairs.”

Even those few minutes she had taken to patch him up did wonders for his balance. He still leaned on her and limped upstairs towards their bedroom, but he didn’t seem as beaten as he did when he had just landed. He let her guide him to the bed and wiggled out of his pants before lying down. Meg came back down to provide him with more alcohol and several bottles of painkillers. He still was much more resilient to them than a human, of course, but at least in this state they might help a bit. He drank without saying a word and dry-swallowed a handful of pills.

“Thank you,” he said, closing his eyes, waiting for the effect to kick in.

Meg placed a hand on the hurt side of his face and pressed just slightly to get his attention back on her.

“You’re welcome. You want to tell me what happened?” she asked on the same breath.

Now that the concern for him and the need to focus on his wounds had passed, Meg felt the anger twirling in his stomach. What the hell had he been thinking? Didn’t he know he scared her to death every time he showed up back home looking like that? Didn’t he realize how much she hated that she couldn’t go with him and help him fight?!

Castiel at least had the decency to look contrite.

“I thought… I thought I could talk to him.”

He didn’t need to clarify who he meant. Meg’s fury changed its target immediately.

“I’m going to kill him,” she said through gritted teeth, holding unto the bed’s frame so tight she could almost hear it break under her grip.

“No. Meg, please. He’s not being himself…”

“Yes, he is!” Meg snapped. “The Mark doesn’t change a person, it just amplifies who they already are. And we always knew Dean was a shitty friend, so…”

Castiel didn’t try to defend him. Perhaps because he knew that Meg wouldn’t listen to his pleas for mercy on behalf of Dean or perhaps because he was too tired to argue with her. Perhaps he was feeling less than charitable towards the “friend” who had literally just beat the shit out of him.

Whatever the reason, Meg was glad he kept quiet.

“Listen, I’m trying,” she told him. “But the witch got her grubby little hands on the Book of the Damned and since you insist on keeping me on Demon Witness Protecting Program, I can’t go anywhere near her without Crowley finding out about me…”

“I know,” Castiel interrupted her, and then softer: “I know.”

Meg took a few seconds to swallow all the things she wanted to say at that moment and simply laid down on the bed next to him. Castiel wiggled to the side to leave some room for her, but he shouldn’t have bothered. Meg put an arm across his chest as gently as she could and snuggled her face against his neck.

They laid together in silence, the starlight pouring in the window at their side.

“We’ll have to find another way to fix him,” Castiel muttered.

“Or, we leave the Winchesters to figure this out on their own and you and I go away on vacation to a sunny island in the middle of the Pacific,” Meg suggested instead.

That managed to elicit a chuckle out of him. So his ribs definitely must have been feeling better.

“That sounds nice.”

“But you’re not going to do it.”

“I have to help them,” Castiel sighed. It didn’t sound like he wanted to, but like he was resigned to this being his responsibility. Like he was tired and hurt and would much rather stay in bed with her. Or maybe that was Meg projecting her own desires on his voice.

In any case, that wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear from him. Because if he insisted in letting the Winchesters drag him into their cycles of self-destruction, then Meg was going to be sucked into them as well. Because there was no way she was going to let him do it alone.

This had already killed her once and she was pretty sure it would kill her again before it was over. Whenever “over” would be.

“Well, you can’t help them if you’re half-dead,” she shot back, trying to hide those thoughts in the back of her head where he couldn’t reach them. “So you’re going to stay here until you’re better.”

He laughed again and moved, very slowly, so he could have his good arm wrapped around her. His skin was still burning hot, but Meg didn’t mind. The heat reminded her of her home.

“Yes, of course,” he muttered, as he pressed his lips against her hair. “My caretaker knows best.”

“Yes, I do,” Meg said, raising her face at him and moving in for a kiss. “You better don’t forget that.”


End file.
